Modernization and Bureaucratic Authoritarianism

Perceived Threat and Authoritarianism

There has been a long history of work on authoritarianism that has looked at the role of societal threat. Much of the empirical research in this tradition has relied on aggregate data to examine the relationship between societal threat and authoritarian attitudes and behaviors. Our analysis uses individual-level data and a range of perceived threat measures to better understand the dynamics of ...

Bureaucratic Responses

This paper’s interest is in understanding how bureaucracies should respond to their clients. I claim that because many services are not priced, bureaucratic responses to their clients will often be the opposite of the reactions of “normal” firms. Specifically, they ignore the most credible complaints from clients, provide the poorest service to clients to value the service most, and require mos...

Authoritarianism and race attitudes in South Africa.

Information, Closeness of Elections and Authoritarianism

Often democracy is defeated by democratically elected leaders who pursue undemocratic policies. The present contribution seeks to explain how information can a¤ect the danger of incompetent or populist politicians being elected into o¢ ce. It is shown with the help of a voting model that both the proportion of informed voters in a society and the state of the economy matter for determining who ...

Medicare, Modernization and FEHBP

Most capitated programs have not generated innovative ways to organize care, but have instead concentrated on enrolling healthy beneficiaries and using crude controls on service use. Competition can lead to a number of problems for beneficiaries, including instability in the care they receive. Choice of plans will not offer many advantages for beneficiaries, particularly since it is important t...